Hands-on: GNOME 2.26 brings incremental improvements

GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the open source desktop environment for …

The developers behind the GNOME project announced the official release of version 2.26 on Tuesday. It includes several useful enhancements, new programs, and improved configuration utilities.

GNOME is an open source desktop environment for the Linux platform. It provides a cohesive desktop user interface and an assortment of applications and utilities for messaging, multimedia, web browsing, and a variety of other tasks. In addition to applications and user interface components, it also offers a collection of application development frameworks that have made it the nexus of a much broader software ecosystem.

GNOME serves as the foundation of the graphical environment in many popular Linux distributions. It is built with an incremental time-based development cycle that produces new stable releases every six months. Although each individual GNOME release is generally a bit light on new features as a result of the short cycle, changes in GNOME account for an important segment of the shared improvements that appear in distros that ship the environment. Several Linux distros, such as Ubuntu, base their development schedule on the GNOME cycle.

Empathy improves but still isn't ready

Empathy is an instant messaging program built on the Telepathy framework. It's designed to provide tighter desktop integration and offer features that are currently outside the scope of Pidgin. In this version, it has gained basic file transfer functionality (only for XMPP at the present time) and support for video chat with clients that support Google's XMPP-based Jingle protocol.

Empathy was originally planned for GNOME 2.22 but was first included in GNOME 2.24. The program still has a lot of rough edges and hasn't yet been adopted by any major Linux distribution.

Ubuntu developer Matthew Paul Thomas conducted a usability study last year in which he compared Pidgin and Empathy. His findings led the Ubuntu desktop team to conclude that Empathy isn't quite ready yet for widespread use. Pidgin is still shipped as the default messaging client in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release. Similarly, the Fedora development community was originally hoping to ship it in the upcoming Fedora 11 release, but identified some key problems that have compelled them to push it back and delay it until Fedora 12.

Empathy's highly modular design, basic video chat capabilities, and excellent support for desktop integration are all major assets. For a growing number of users, these benefits outweigh its deficiencies and limitations. I suspect that it only needs one or two more GNOME development cycles before it's going to be ready to displace Pidgin in GNOME distros.

Brasero burns my eyes

The Brasero disc burning software is one of the new applications that is included in 2.26. GNOME's Nautilus file manager already had built-in functionality for burning ISO file and simple data discs, but Brasero offers a wider range of features including support for creating audio CDs. Prior to its inclusion in GNOME, Brasero was already being shipped in several Linux distributions.

I included a concise overview of its strengths and weaknesses in my review of Ubuntu 8.04 last year. It's improved a bit since then and has added support for video and several other features. The project user interface, however, seems to have worsened. They have gotten rid of the useful disc capacity meter at the bottom and replaced it with a size indicator element that is displayed next to each item in the file list.

They have also added a file filtering mechanism of some kind at the bottom of the window. It isn't entirely clear to me what purpose it is supposed to serve, but it seems like unnecessary clutter. I also strongly dislike the superfluous file preview feature which wastes a lot of screen space in order to display a playable video thumbnail. The preview feature is fortunately easy to disable.

The whole programs feels uncharacteristically clunky by GNOME standards, but it's a lot more functional than the stale and unambitious CD burning component that was included in previous versions of GNOME. I think that Brasero is the right way forward in the long term, but the user interface really doesn't please me.

My biggest complaint with the old Nautilus CD burner is that it didn't give you clear visual hints about how much space you have left when you are putting in files to burn. The fact that Brasero dropped that feature is a bit of a disappointment. It seems like the task of building a good disc burning UI with GTK+ is not trivial and it's something that I suspect will take a skilled designer rather than a developer.

Despite the problems with Brasero's interface, it's really a very capable program with a rich feature set, which leaves me hopeful that it will be able to really shine someday.